Laurence Crane: ‘I try to find new ways of making form and structure’

If you’re at all interested in the spare, slow, repetitive, sometimes very long music of the American composer Morton Feldman, then you probably know about the connection with Persian carpets. Feldman was interested in the sameness of the patterns, and the imperfections that made sure the repeats of the patterns were never going to be exact.

The English composer Laurence Crane also writes mostly slow, spare, repetitive music. But the connection that might come to mind is with an entirely different area of artistic endeavour: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” as Michelangelo put it. The feeling I get from Crane’s work – some of which is about to be premiered in Ireland – is about how much he must have discarded or rejected to arrive at the material he chooses to work with.

Crane grew up in Oxford. His father’s interest in chamber music ensured that there were plenty of recordings of classical repertoire to listen to, and the city afforded him a rich concert life. “I just became more and more interested and decided that I wanted to try and write my own music at some point. I didn’t really know how to do it. But eventually I sort of found out.”

He did a degree in music at Nottingham University, because “I never really achieved proficiency in any instrument. So I wanted to find somewhere to study where the emphasis on being a practical musician was not high, where musicology and composition were important in the degree. Nottingham at the time fitted that.”

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Crane, who was born in 1961, describes his early influences as a “mixture of early 20th-century stuff: Bartók, Stravinsky, Berg, maybe, Schoenberg. Then, on the other hand” – he laughs – “prog rock. Because I am of that age when it was current.”

He reacted against what he describes as the “sort of English modernist sound” that was current when he began composing. He was drawn instead to “the work of the English experimental composers, the composers who were influenced mainly by Cornelius Cardew, composers like Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons.”

What he liked was “the way that those composers were trying to do something different with tonality. I never took up a cudgel or anything, you know. It was all polite. But there was just something in the modernist sound at that time that had become very formulaic. I wanted a new way of thinking about things.”

The first of his works that he’s still happy to have performed dates from 1985 – “a series of short pieces for cello and piano”. Before then, he says, his music was, as it still is, “texturally and gesturally very sparse”, but it was “harmonically more abrasive”.

When he thinks back to that time he remembers hearing the music of Howard Skempton in his first term at Nottingham, in 1980. “I heard that music and it made a huge impact on me. But, weirdly, it didn’t make me write like that immediately. I don’t know whether I had something to work through before I could actually find a language that is far more distilled than I was even doing at that time.”

Skempton’s work, which has been praised by the conductor James Weeks for its complex beauty under a veneer of simplicity, has had an interesting mix of advocates in Ireland. Skempton regularly appears in programmes by Chamber Choir Ireland under Paul Hillier and has been espoused in concerts that were either planned or performed by the composers Gerald Barry, Seán Clancy, Siobhán Cleary, Donnacha Dennehy, Brian Irvine, Jane O’Leary and Ian Wilson.

Crane has been described as making “graceful, cheeky, elusive music out of ordinary things”. His new String Quartet No 2, for Louth Contemporary Music Society’s Folks’ Music festival, is a move in an entirely different direction.

“In this quartet I decided to do something I hadn’t really done before,” he says, “and that is to take actual material from other composers and use it.”

A lot of his pieces are based on what he describes as “maybe short chord sequences that are entirely familiar from earlier music but not actually pinpointable. You can’t say, This comes from here. They’re familiar from the vernacular.”

The twist is that “they don’t behave as they did in the 18th-century or 19th-century world. Because I’ve developed a way of working with the material. I always invent the chord sequences myself, even though they’re common chords.”

The difference in the new quartet is that, through relistening in fine detail to Beethoven’s late string quartets, music Crane has known since he was young, he came to wonder “what it would be like if I took some chord sequences from one or more of the Beethoven quartets and worked the sequences in the way that I would normally work”.

I feel it incumbent on me not to just keep doing the same thing, even though you might be only varying it a little bit. You’re always looking for the new ways of exploring material

He has ended up with an unusually shaped work, with three very unequal movements – four minutes, nine minutes and one minute. He says that “all three are 99 per cent based on three chord sequences from Beethoven’s Op 127, the late quartet in E flat major. In two cases, the sequences that permeate the first and third movements, they’re really quite innocuous, transitional or cadential sequences that just appear at a certain point. I present them in their original voicings and then work them in my own way.”

The middle movement is the odd one out. He describes it as “more discursive and more complex structurally”. And it’s based on the very distinctive four-chord sequence that opens the quartet. He says that in his quartet it will sound “vaguely familiar if you know the piece. It’s a little bit disguised, but at the same time, if you know it, it’s sort of clear.”

Has he ever been intimidated by writing a string quartet? It’s a genre with a history so elevated and revered that many composers have found it a burden. Crane points out wryly that “I didn’t write a quartet until I was 52 years of age. Maybe there’s something in that. Or maybe it’s just the case that no quartet actually asked me for one.” But he has never felt the weight of history. “One has to develop a healthy relationship with the past, which means as much plundering as revering it. It would be very easy to get intimidated by the literature. Maybe if I was 30 years of age it might be more problematic.”

He says he’s always looking for ways to renew his language. “Mostly for me it’s trying to find new ways of making form and structure. That comes from the material, obviously. I feel it incumbent on me not to just keep doing the same thing, even though you might be only varying it a little bit. You’re always looking for the new ways of exploring material. I like very much composers – Michael Finnissy being one, Cassandra Miller another – whose music is mostly about finding ways of moving from the music of the past. I thought, I probably can’t do it like they can. But I could do it in my own way.”

To avoid putting him on the spot about describing his own music, I ask about other people’s descriptions that he has found himself identifying with. He suggests an article published in 2016 by the pianist Philip Thomas, dedicatee of the new quartet, with whom he has worked regularly over the years. But before he can extract any quote from his brain, he comes up with something said on radio by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, founder and director of the ensemble Apartment House. Lukoszevieze said his music was “like holding a small bird in your hand”.

Just to be sure, as he has written a lot of music that I’ve never heard, I ask if any of his work has anything like a climax, an emotional peak, a whiff of sentimentality, the tension of a Rossini crescendo. “Not really,” he says. “No. But never say never.”

Laurence Crane’s String Quartet No 2 is premiered by the Esposito Quartet at Spirit Store, Dundalk, on Saturday, June 17th. The concert is part of Louth Contemporary Music Society’s Folks’ Music festival, which takes place on Friday, June 16th, and Saturday, June17th. Matthew Owens gives the Irish premiere of the first book of Howard Skempton’s Preludes and Fugues during the upcoming Pipeworks Festival, at St Michael’s Church, Dún Laoghaire, on Sunday, July 25th